The entire American medical community is impassively drifting into a
social, legal, and financial maelstrom that will destroy countless careers
and lives. That maelstrom will result from the uniquely American social
practice of "routine infant circumcision."

Evidence clearly documents that routine infant circumcision:

1. Violates all seven principles of the AMA Code of Ethics

2. Has no medical justification

3. Has an unacceptable risk of complications

4. Is a mutilative and contraindicated amputation of the protective and
functional tissue on a healthy organ

5. Fails to legally qualify as surgery:

a. No diseased tissue is removed

b. No abnormality is repaired

c. No injury or disorder is treated

d. The patient (victim) is non-consenting

6. Legally is an act of criminal assault

7. Is a purely social convention

8. Contributes to sexual impotence in adult men

9. Is becoming a media "cause celebre"

Treating the naturally flawless foreskin as a birth defect robs an
infant of his birthright. Removal of his innate erogenous and
protective tissue deprives him of his constitutionally guaranteed
right to pursue happiness through sexual fulfillment as an adult.

Citing just such arguments in September, 1996, Congress passed a law
making the genital mutilation of females illegal. Under the equal
protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, this law must also apply to
males. A test case is currently working its way through the federal court
system.

Consent forms for routine genital mutilation are worthless paper. A
parent cannot give valid consent on behalf of a child when the surgical act
is medically unnecessary. In law, a contract is not legal if the purpose of
its content is illegal. The victim is too young to give informed consent
to cosmetic surgery on his penis. Furthermore, his cries and struggle
against his restraints legally give 'constructive notice' that he is
non-consenting.

Many parents who sign consent forms later express they felt coerced or
even tricked into signing them. The consent form folly effectively
conjoins hospitals and physicians as co-conspirators violating the civil
rights of the infant.

In the very near future an American medical doctor will be prosecuted
and convicted of criminal assault in a case of routine infant circumcision - a
genital mutilation. This will open up the floodgates to copycat lawsuits.
Given the facts, most of those lawsuits could be successful. Financial
losses would be staggering. And the media circus would radically
depreciate public opinion of all American physicians for a generation.

Malpractice insurance companies will not pay when a doctor is
convicted of a criminal act of deception by an intentional act of omission. Failure
to adequately inform the parents of the protective and erogenous functions
of the male foreskin, and its irretrievable loss by circumcision is that
omission. Deception and misrepresentation regarding the medical
advisability of an unnecessary sexual reductive surgery could result in a
conviction of a
criminal act of fraud. Criminal fraud cannot be dismissed in discovery;
it must be settled or go to public trial.

Because medical insurance companies cover the procedure neonatally
they may be drawn into the lawsuits as criminal co-conspirators. These
trials will portray the kaleidoscopic multitude of scientifically
disproved excuses given for routine infant male genital mutilation as
the greatest medical hoax of the twentieth century - a veritable sexual
holocaust.

Three sobering facts should give malpractice insurance companies
reason to reflect on their steadily increasing potential for loss:

1. The current evidence against routine infant male genital mutilation.

2. The great number of physicians who still wantonly perform these social
mutilations.

3. The awakening of adult male consciousness and subsequent
hostility regarding the life-long detrimental effects of their sexual
mutilation.

Moreover, if more physicians decide to "humanely" use anesthetics, the
risk of complications will sharply rise. Malpractice insurance companies
will undoubtedly soon take note of this added risk to this medical/legal
time bomb.

American medical doctors may also be prosecuted for human rights
violations under international law. Given the evidence against routine
infant male genital mutilation, physicians could be found guilty of "crimes
against humanity". America is shamefully the only country left on earth
where routine (non-religious) male genital mutilations are still done in
great numbers - a fact the more civilized jury populations of Europe and
Asia find appalling.

One way or another the longest running unchecked social experiment in
American history, "Routine Infant Male Genital Mutilation", is about to
abruptly end. Physicians guilty of professional ignorance or of deceiving
parents regarding the life-long deleterious effects of their actions will
no longer be tolerated. The privilege of unaccountability will cease.
Times and people change. Unlike past generations, twenty-first century
parents will not blindly acquiesce to unquestioned medical authority.

The
Fifth International Symposium on Sexual Mutilations will convene
August 5th at the University of Oxford, England. There, forty-five world
renowned medical, legal, and human rights experts will provide enough facts
and sound bites to attract every lawyer in this hemisphere to the
embarrassing predicament American physicians, hospitals, and insurers
have created for themselves.

There is a solution to the pending dilemma that can save the assets of
the medical community, and it's integrity. If Congress were to pass a law
specifically making male genital mutilation illegal, as it did for females,
then a principal in American law called "ex post facto" would protect all
medical doctors and hospitals from prosecution for those same acts -
provided they were committed before the law was enacted. That is as close
to a blanket amnesty for past crimes as is legally possible in this country.

The AMA should take the lead in protecting its members and immediately
pass a Resolution to the Congress of the United States requesting that, "In
the name of humanity," this Congress should pass emergency legislation
making the routine genital mutilation of males a federal crime.

Without this legislation the entire American medical community is now
risking more than just shame and humiliation for this senseless and
inhumane practice, it's risking imminent financial calamity.